Evaluation

Throughout my second year I feel my professional practise has improved a lot. At the beginning of the year I hoped to feel more confident about presenting my work and talking about it. If I want to get my work out into the world I need to be able to convince people it is worth looking at. I feel I have accomplished this to a certain extent. In small groups I am more than happy to talk about my work but in more formal settings in front of lots of people I get very nervous. I feel I am more confident than I was last year but I still have a lot more to gain to be at the place I want to be; hopefully this can be gained in my third year.

From going to artist talks and exhibitions I have learnt about innovative ways to curate my work and ways to sustain a income whilst still creating work that excites you. I found the artist talks so helpful and I try to go to as many as possible, I been to most of the ones that have been on this year, some have been more inspiring than others. In this booklet I have talked about my favourites.

I feel I have improved in most areas in my skills audit, sadly I feel I messed the one I did last year up or I was over ambitious of my skill set as I put some areas higher than I have put them now and I know my skills haven’t got worse, they have got better. I am looking forward to seeing how they improve further next year. I struggled to complete my five year plan at first as I was not sure of where I wanted to go after university. I went to a few events during enterprise week I got so much good advice that is so valuable in helping me get to where I want to go in the future.

I got asked to do quite a few fashion photoshoots I discovered that I actually really enjoy it, especially as I got to add my own take on the shoot because they didn’t want them to look too commercial. My confidence a grown doing these as I had to work with models I didn’t know and direct them to ensure that I got the best shot. I was nervous at first but once I got into it I really enjoyed all the shoots. This made me think how I could become a photography assistant, that way I will be able to learn loads from the photographers, and further my own practice.

A topic I find very interesting and what is very important is ethics. I would always assume that my work is not breaking any ethical rules but there is more to think about than I first thought. I have touched a subjects like mental health, in the future I need to make sure I refer back to the questions I talked about to make sure I keep creating work fort the right reasons and I don’t get caught in the ‘I must get the perfect shot’ mentality.

The print auction and symposium taught me so much about team work and communication. How it can so easily go wrong and nearly ruin an event. I would say I am always a hard working team player and it is annoying when you are working in teams where there are people that are not. If you are hosting an event where you have invited people to come to you need to make sure things get done even if it means you have to pull extra weight.

For the print auction, I was in the fundraising team. There were many issues that me and Shola had to deal with as no one else in our team were pulling their weight. Many people unexpectedly dropped out an others just didn’t do what was asked of them. The only upside to this was that me and Shola learnt a lot of new skills, one of my favourites being how to use Adobe’s Premier Pro. I will now be able to film and edit moving image, something I have always wanted to do for a project. I thought I might enjoy fundraising but I don’t think I’d want to do this as part of my career in the future.

The symposium was very interesting, I have never been apart of something like this, sadly we never got the full experience due to the Skype call not actually going ahead. As a group there were a few things we all did wrong towards the end. We were so organised during the preparation but we fell short at the last hurdle. After a brief talk with one of the lectures I now understand where we went wrong and why our first run through failed as a symposium. I was on the design team and I really enjoyed making the logo, it is something I am going to try and do more of in the future.

Since last year I feel the way I present my work has improved a great deal, I think more about how I want my work to look as I’m making it. I have given more consideration to other ways in which I could present my work, I may not always go for it as I feel a more traditional method is more effective but I want to start to be more experimental with the presentation of work my work so that I continue to push myself out my comfort zone.

To begin with I didn’t like the idea of having to create a booklet on InDesign as I thought it would be time consuming and complicated but I have actually really enjoyed creating it. I am thinking I might use to make my journals with next year as they look really professional and it is really easy to create different Styles. It took me a little while to get used to how everything works but once you get to grips with it its not as complicated as it looks. I think I enjoyed this so much as I am really into design work and this is more similar than I first thought.

I have an Instagram account that is dedicated purely to my photography, I have been developing it over the year, trying to gain as many followers as possible. To try and give my feed a professional feel I have opted to for posting triptychs so its the same type of image on each row. I think it is a very effective method. It has also got me thinking about what three images will work well together when I am doing a shoot.

I feel I have made major improves from my blog from last year. I am using Wix instead of Wordpress and I am so glad I made the switch, it is so much easier to create your own style and it looks so much more professional. I created a website where I can showcase my personal work and then it takes you to my blog where you can view all my university work. I am thinking of adding in a commercial section as well because I am doing an increasing number of fashion shoots and I think it would be a good platform to showcase the diversity of my skills.

As much as I haven’t enjoyed some parts of this unit it has been enjoyable overall and reflecting on what I have achieved over the year I am happy with where I have come and where I will go in the very fast approaching third year. Within third year I hope to gain more confidence with talking in front of groups of people as I feel this is so important for being able to network. I am also looking forward to see how my design skills will develop. I think this will be really important as I really want to create books out of my work and a big part of a successful book is how it has been designed and laid out.